


The Chain Reaction

by A_Death_and_A_Maiden



Category: Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, M/M, Organized Crime, Rating May Change, Smuggling, Star Sheriffs cross to the evil side, Tags May Change, mafia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 23:20:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29215593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Death_and_A_Maiden/pseuds/A_Death_and_A_Maiden
Summary: But Saber Rider had this bad gut feeling.This was gonna be their last cargo drop before the Earth summit.What could possibly wrong?“Do you want a list?”- asked him Jesse back when Saber and the Outrider shared a smoke. Outside Ramrod because April would smell it and make a fuss.Later, Saber Rider would think that Jesse Blue had extrasensory abilities to look into the future.
Relationships: Jesse Blue/April Eagle, Saber Rider/Sincia





	The Chain Reaction

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Silverfox for beta reading!

The Chain Reaction

Prologue 

_This one goes out to the man who mines for miracles  
This one goes out to the ones in need  
This one goes out to the sinner and the cynical  
This ain't about no apology  
This road was paved by the hopeless and the hungry  
This road was paved by the winds of change  
Walking beside the guilty and the innocent  
How will you raise your hand when they call your name? (Bon Jovi)_

\---  
“This,”- thought Saber Rider, lifting his favourite coffee mug to his lips and crossing his ankles on top of his control panel in Ramrod, -”is the biggest fraud ever.”

The day Saber Rider met Fireball in the hotel lobby changed Saber’s life. The safe good old world that Saber knew for his whole twenty-something years was smashed into tiny pieces which he glued together and received a queer mosaic that he was living in now. And blast him if he wasn’t enjoying every day of it.

Saber Rider took a mental trip back to his life before the U-turn, before the Day When Everything Changed. He was born into a noble clan with a castle in the Scottish mountains. The castle bore a legacy of great historic heritage and a great amount of debt, which was also somewhat historic because their family had been accruing debts for decades. The castle was huge and centuries old, it was in constant need of expensive repairs. It was crumbling apart not from Outrider attacks but from mold, rodents, foundation dampness, roof leaks, rust, wind, erosion and sometimes Saber thought that pulling the place down stone by stone and putting up a modern skyscraper would be much more common sense than ongoing repairs. 

The castle qualified for government aid in return for making it accessible to tourists. The mere thought that noisy obnoxious strangers were gonna trample the historic grounds of their family, take selfies with tripods and sticks, stampede in the rose garden that entertained royalty and pet the stable horses that won cups was an abomination to the good family name. The Lancelot family came from a lineage of skilled warriors and great clan leaders, they were natural hosts but they preferred to chose their guests. Since money didn’t grow on trees or Scottish thistles, a line of credit had to be arranged through the Bank of Scotland and the ancestor portrait gallery, the dowry porcelain collection, the antique furniture, the silverware and even his mother’s diamond jewelry were collateral to debt repayments that had to be drawn from the land that belonged to the estate. They had tenants on the land that did the herding of cattle and worked the land, but there was little money and a lot of hard work. 

Star Sheriffs and other military positions in the New Frontier military weren’t exactly the best paid career opportunities in the world, either. But there were other perks: training in a variety of combat strategies, learning a plethora of foreign languages, getting and healthy beyond standards of an average person, decent free hot meals when on duty and paid sick leave. Shared accommodation sucked, though. But as he rose in the ranks and made himself a reputation, Saber Rider had more than he had ever hoped for- he had his private apartment on the HQ compound equipped with a small kitchenette fit for a bachelor man and a finally private bathroom, a mecha horse, and an access to Cavalry Command databases of the entire New Frontier but best of all he had the state-of-the-art scientific achievement of humankind the Ramrod Equalizer Unit. 

The Ramrod Equalizer Unit that his team used to smuggle crystals, metals and minerals from human planets to the Outriders. Outriders used these natural resources to develop their technologies, including warfare, so essentially Team Ramrod was committing high treason. Because the day Saber Rider met Fireball in the hotel lobby changed Saber’s life. It gave Saber something he seriously lacked.  
A sense of purpose.  
A taste of thrill.  
A life on the edge.  
And money, of course. The line of credit in the Bank of Scotland was a fraud too because that’s how he laundered his share of the money from the trade with Outriders. 

Getting caught? Saber twisted his lips wryly when this thought flashed in his mind. He uncrossed his ankles and crossed them again, changing legs. Getting caught and court martialled was very unlikely but in case that did happen he had the best possible insurance ever. April Eagle, their IT specialist, was the daughter and an only child of Commander Eagle. April had lost her mother very early and Commander Eagle dotted on April, trying to make up for the time he had to spend in the office. What he couldn’t give as a father, he gave as a sponsor. Now the strategy backfired because April grew to be a spoiled brat with a huge daddy complex. If Saber was gonna sink with that, he’d take April with him, and that meant that, since the Commander’s parental guilt was bigger than his sense of officer honour, they were gonna make it safe and sound together and then April would pull Colt and Fireball out. 

Colt was was doing their accounts. That line of credit in the Bank of Scotland was Colt’s idea. Who would suspect a national bank of money laundering? The cowboy had a head for figures. The camaraderie came to the agreement that everyone gets an equal share of the proceedings and Colt helped them set up secret retirement accounts in locations that didn’t have extradition agreements. His thirst for riches and taste for expensive women made him broadly known in narrow circles and in his presence rich married men clutched their wallets with one hand and wrapped the other hand around their wives. If pursuing a married woman was an Olympic sport, Colt would make it to the podium every time. The only regret was that a poet died in this playboy. Saber Rider did their strategy, April Eagle did their technologies, Bill ‘Colt’ Wilcox did their accounting and Shinji ‘Fireball’ Hikari from the Yakuza called the shots. Ramrod Team was one big chain reaction.

Fireball also counted poker cards and backed pool players. He also made a most delicious sushi their team had ever eaten. He had body tattoos of dragons and koi fish but they were temporary and called for regular renewals because the good moral conduct for Cavalry Command expressively forbade certain body modifications, including tattoos. Annual medical check-ups would register any type of deviation from what was considered traditional norms and then there would be bitching from the superiors. Saber Rider rubbed his tongue piercing against the upper side of his mouth. His piercing may prove to be dangerous in combat or accident but Saber didn’t want the piercing hole to grow together, so he needed to keep the piercing in for some time. 

The only person who could sink their ship at any given time was April’s boyfriend, Jesse Blue. A teal-haired renegade and an outlaw, Jesse managed to crawl his way into April’s system and became her favourite kind of heroin. He wasn’t even human, he was an Outrider and a Chief of Security for the Ninth Degree, a complex computer system that ran the entire Outrider network. It was his idea to start smuggling crystals, metals and minerals from the human world and he was their major buyer. The Ninth Degree consumed incomprehensible amounts of cobalt, nickel, lithium, graphite and copper. The New Frontier had a lot to offer in this department until the Federation officially banned the trade of natural resources with planets that didn’t belong to the Federation. Jesse didn’t give a flying fuck about Saber, Colt and Fireball and both Jesse and April had a mutual agreement to ditch each other as soon as it was hot under the collar. 

The stalemate situation between the two worlds lasted until the moment the Outrider HQ planet Metheus applied to join the Federation. The application was pending until the Federation summit took place on Earth next month, though there was no doubt it was gonna be rejected. Jesse was seething with laughter like a hyena when he broke the news to them on their last cargo dump on the outskirts of the New Frontier that they dubbed as “maintenance downtime” when in fact Fireball, Saber and Colt waited patiently playing a round of robber while Jesse and April went to her room to make out. The application rejection would trigger Outrider aggression and the New Frontier planets nearest to the border were already pulling their defense strategies together and upgrading their weaponry.

May you live in interesting times, right? 

No family. No children. This was the law Fireball lay very early in their criminal career. They were the mob and it was unlikely they’ll die peacefully in their own beds of old age. Their families were vulnerability what their enemies could use against them. Team Ramrod was a family of their own. 

Team Ramrod was a family of their own in the very letter of the law. Saber was married to April and Colt was married to Fireball. They filed their marriage applications together, they paid for the quickest ceremony possible, they jointly marched to the registry office and got their marriage certificates, then cross-witnessed each other’s marriage certificates. Luckily, it was at their own discretion to update their personal files in the Cavalry Command information system, so the fact of their single status having changed went unnoticed because the registry office didn’t have the obligation to bring this type of personal information to anyone’s authority. Now they were ‘next of kin’ the hospital would call first, that gave them some space for maneuvering to get rid of any incriminating evidence against their partner, including their personal quarters on Ramrod. They did have a small celebration with sushi that Fireball made especially for this occasion and wine that Saber had obtained from the wine cellar of his family castle. DRC Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Montrachet Grand Cru, Côte de Beaune, France, five thousand credits a bottle. 

Every tiny detail was weighted and measured. The plan clicked.  
But Saber Rider had this bad gut feeling.  
This was gonna be their last cargo drop before the Earth summit.  
What could possibly wrong?  
“Do you want a list?”- asked him Jesse back when Saber and the Outrider shared a smoke. Outside Ramrod because April would smell it and make a fuss. 

Later, Saber Rider would think that Jesse Blue had extrasensory abilities to look into the future. 

To be continued.


End file.
